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Format menu "align" in html view?

Why is it that the Format menu (menu bar or contextual) displays the Alignment sub-menu grayed out in html mode? It apparently can only be used in Rich Text mode. I do most of my writing in html mode, but some html commands that I seldom use are hard to remember. I don't see any particular reason why selected text can't be formatted in html mode just as block quotes, etc. are. Am I missing something or doing something wrong?

(My workaround is to open a new post, switch to Rich text mode, copy the html code, then close that post without saving, and paste into the post being written/edited. That works, but it's a real pain.)

Thanks,

Rod

Comments

Hi Rod - the answer is based in MarsEdit's HTML mode is mostly just a plain text editor with syntax highlighting. It doesn't have "smarts" about the content or structure of the HTML, like the Rich Text mode does. So all the formatting macros are limited to stuff that can be achieved by taking the selection and wrapping it in a simple tag e.g. like "strong".

While it would be possible to include some formatting macros to e.g. wrap the selected text in a div that is right-aligned, it would be a little sloppy and wouldn't match the HTML style of many folks. I think that to properly support advanced formatting changes like text alignment, I would need to add enough smarts to MarsEdit about plain text to be able to essentially add and remove CSS style attributes to the selected chunk of text, and then for example remove them and replace them with other style attributes when changing alignment.

In short: I am not comfortable with being able to do a great job on such formatting macros, so I don't include them by default. You are free though to add your own custom macros and try to achieve something that will do the trick for you. (See "Customize" at the bottom of the Format menu).